


The Pleiades Go Down

by Amanda Bankier (barnowl)



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: F/M, horns of a dilemma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-26
Updated: 2008-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-02 01:09:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barnowl/pseuds/Amanda%20Bankier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack is ambushed by poetry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pleiades Go Down

**Author's Note:**

> Set after the episode A Hundred Days.
> 
> The quoted poetry is from Mary Barnard's translation of Sappho (University of California Press, 1958).

"Maybourne, you are an idiot every day of the week! Why couldn't you have just taken _one_ day off?" - Major Carter, in Foothold.  


***

I would do _anything_, but there's nothing I can do.

I remember her embarrassed face when I coaxed her (This was before ... ) to tell me exactly what she said to Colonel Maybourne, and her guilty, complicit, trusting smile when she told me.

In the end he did take one day off (a few hours, anyway) to save our bacon; I couldn't take five minutes of a hundred days to save my soul.

***

When the beat-up little orange paperback caught my eye on a used-book cart I recognised the name (most people would) and grabbed at the possibility of distraction, a foreign kind of titillation. I had no idea.

> I have a small  
> daughter called  
> Cleis, who is
> 
> like a golden  
> flower  
>            I wouldn't  
> take all Croesus'   
> kingdom with love   
> thrown in, for her.

Only one hundred poems. Shreds, some shorter than half a dozen words. As far away in time as my maybe-to-be daughter is in space, and this old Greek girl cuts away my defences with contemptuous ease. Does Daniel feel like this, as if the old ones talk right to him out of his rocks and writings? How does he bear it? They had their heads together today --- the first time I've heard her laugh in so long --- I should be grateful. I should wish ...

***

Admirable, sure of herself, strong, so alike in some ways. I was lost, and she asked me...

***

 

Sam has never asked me for anything, but trust.

> The moon and then  
> the Pleiades  
> go down
> 
> The night is now  
> half-gone; youth  
> goes; I am
> 
> in bed alone.


End file.
